The Aran Islands. J. M. Synge

who was born blind, and one night she dreamed that she saw an island with a blessed well in it that could cure her son. She told her dream in the morning, and an old man said it was of Aran she was after dreaming.

      ‘She brought her son down by the coast of Galway, and came out in a curagh, and landed below where you see a bit of a cove.

      ‘She walked up then to the house of my father – God rest his soul – and she told them what she was looking for. ‘My father said that there was a well like what she had dreamed of, and that he would send a boy along with her to show her the way.

      ‘ “There’s no need, at all,” said she, “haven’t I seen it all in my dream?”

      ‘Then she went out with the child and walked up to this well, and she kneeled down and began saying her prayers. Then she put her hand out for the water, and put it on his eyes, and the moment it touched him he called out: “O mother, look at the pretty flowers!” ‘

      After that Mourteen described the feats of poteen drinking and fighting that he did in his youth, and went on to talk of Diarmaid, who was the strongest man after Samson, and of one of the beds of Diarmaid and Grainne, which is on the east of the islands. He says that Diarmaid was killed by the druids, who put a burning shirt on him, a fragment of mythology that may connect Diarmaid with the legend of Hercules, if it is not due to the ‘learning’ in some hedge-school master’s ballad.

      Then we talked about Inishmaan.

      ‘You’ll have an old man to talk with you over there,’ he said, ‘and tell you stories of the fairies, but he’s walking about with two sticks under him this ten year. Did ever you hear what it is goes on four legs when it is young, and on two legs after that, and on three legs when it does be old?’

      I gave him the answer.

      ‘Ah, master,’ he said, ‘you’re a cute one, and the blessing of God be on you. Well, I’m on three legs this minute, but the old man beyond is back on four; I don’t know if I’m better than the way he is; he’s got his sight and I’m only an old dark man.’

      I am settled at last on Inishmaan in a small cottage with a continual drone of Gaelic coming from the kitchen that opens into my room.

      Early this morning the man of the house came over for me with a four-oared curagh – that is, a curagh with four rowers and four oars on either side, as each man uses two – and we set off a little before noon.

      It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went on the sea.

      We had to stop for a moment at a hulk that is anchored in the bay, to make some arrangements for the fish-curing of the middle island, and my crew called out as soon as we were within earshot that they had a man with them who had been in France a month from this day.

      When we started again, a small sail was run up in the bow and we set off across the sound with a leaping oscillation that had no resemblance to the heavy movement of a boat.

      The sail is only used as an aid, so the men continued to row after it had gone up, and as they occupied the four cross-seats I lay on the canvas at the stern and the frame of slender laths, which bent and quivered as the waves passed under them.

      When we set off it was a brilliant morning of April and the green, glittering waves seemed to toss the canoe among themselves, yet as we drew nearer this island a sudden thunderstorm broke out behind the rocks we were approaching and lent a momentary tumult to this still vein of the Atlantic.

      We landed at a small pier from which a rude track leads up to the village between small fields and bare sheets of rock like those in Aranmor. The youngest son of my boatman, a boy of about seventeen, who is to be my teacher and guide, was waiting for me at the pier and guided me to his house, while the men settled the curagh and followed slowly with my baggage.

      My room is at one end of the cottage, with a boarded floor and ceiling, and two windows opposite each other. Then there is the kitchen with an earth floor and open rafters, and two doors opposite each other opening into the open air, but no windows. Beyond it there are two small rooms of half the width of the kitchen with one window apiece.

      The kitchen itself, where I will spend most of my time, is full of beauty and distinction. The red dresses of the women who cluster round the fire on their stools give a glow of almost Eastern richness, and the walls have been toned by the turf-smoke to a soft brown that blends with the grey earth-colour of the floor. Many sorts of fishing-tackle, and the nets and oilskins of the men, are hung upon the walls or among the open rafters; and right overhead, under the thatch, there is a whole cowskin from which they make pampooties.

      Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life. The curaghs and spinning-wheels, the tiny wooden barrels that are still much used in the place of earthenware, the home-made cradles, churns and baskets, are all full of individuality, and being made from materials that are common here, yet to some extent peculiar to the island, they seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about them.

      The simplicity and unity of the dress increases in another way the local air of beauty. The women wear red petticoats and jackets of the island wool stained with madder, to which they usually add a plaid shawl twisted round their chests and tied at the back. When it rains they throw another petticoat over their heads with the waistband round their faces, or, if they are young, they use a heavy shawl like those worn in Galway. Occasionally other wraps are worn, and during the thunderstorm I arrived in I saw several girls with men’s waistcoats buttoned round their bodies. Their skirts do not come much below the knee, and show their powerful legs in the heavy indigo stockings with which they are all provided.

      The men wear three colours: the natural wool, indigo and a grey flannel that is woven of alternate threads of indigo and the natural wool. In Aranmor many of the younger men have adopted the usual fisherman’s jersey, but I have only seen one on this island.

      As flannel is cheap – the women spin the yarn from the wool of their own sheep, and it is then woven by a weaver in Kilronan for fourpence a yard – the men seem to wear an indefinite number of waistcoats and woollen drawers one over the other. They are usually surprised at the lightness of my own dress, and one old man I spoke to for a minute on the pier, when I came ashore, asked me if I was not cold with ‘my little clothes’.

      As I sat in the kitchen to dry the spray from my coat, several men who had seen me walking up came in to talk to me, usually murmuring on the threshold, ‘The blessing of God on this place,’ or some similar words.

      The courtesy of the old woman of the house is singularly attractive, and though I could not understand much of what she said – she has no English – I could see with how much grace she motioned each visitor to a chair or stool, according to his age, and said a few words to him till he drifted into our English conversation.

      For the moment my own arrival is the chief subject of interest and the men who come in are eager to talk to me.

      Some of them express themselves more correctly than the ordinary peasant, others use the Gaelic idioms continually and substitute ‘he’ or ‘she’ for ‘it’, as the neuter pronoun is not found in modern Irish.

      A few of the men have a curiously full vocabulary, others know only the commonest words in English and are driven to ingenious devices to express their meaning. Of all the subjects we can talk of, war seems their favourite, and the conflict between America and Spain is causing a great deal of excitement. Nearly all the families have relations who have had to cross the Atlantic, and all eat of the flour and bacon that is brought from the United States, so they have a vague fear that ‘if anything happened to America’, their own island would cease to be habitable.

      Foreign languages are another favourite topic and, as these men are bilingual, they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms. Most of the strangers they see on the islands are philological students, and the people have